St Margaret’s and the miracle

Percy from the Pews

MANY STORIES have been published over the years of people claiming to have seen the faces of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in strange and diverse settings.

These “perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena”, as they’ve been aptly described, have ranged from a dental X-ray to burn marks in a pan used for making tortillas (this in New Mexico where a shrine was built to it), from a pretzel said to look like the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, to a “Jesus face” on a Google map (still there to be viewed), to a Pizza Hut billboard. And then there’s the famous Turin Shroud.

Most of these sightings have been in the United States, so how about Australia, and, more specifically, Tasmania? There is such a story, and it comes from the recently closed St Margaret’s Anglican Church in North Hobart.

I wrote about its enforced end in Vale: St Margaret’s mentioning its history from origins in 1871 in a book by Craig Cracknell. This also included the memories of parishioner Jack Philp, and I particularly liked his fondly remembering annual Sunday School picnics at Cornelian Bay with the comment: “Of course back then Cornelian Bay was a proper beach.”

He also revealed an intriguing fact many people wouldn’t be aware of, that after a particularly fierce and heavy rain storm a large water stain appeared behind the picture of the Last Supper above St Margaret’s altar – and the stain resembled the shape of Jesus’ head.

Jack brought it to the attention of then Rector Canon Keith Hay after a service, and just before the walls were due to be whitewashed.

“Jack was particularly keen to have the stain left, not painted over. However, he wasn’t successful in his appeal, and subsequently this unique stain was whitewashed over. It is Jack’s wish that one day the stain may be revealed,” wrote Craig.

So there’s an interesting challenge ahead for the buyer of St Margaret’s now that the Anglican Church is selling the building.

Images of Jesus in wall paint, in water-stained plaster, in bricks, trees, and in clouds, have been recorded. And back in the 1930s, in Manhattan, New York, a minister saw the figure of Jesus in a marble wall after delivering the Lenten sermon. The sermon was titled: “The Mystery of Incarnation”.